[Video description: footage of Bo Burnham speaking at some kind of panel. Initially the camera is zoomed close on his face and torso. The camera view occasionally pans out showing that he is sitting on a stool, between two pale-skinned individuals. They are backlit by a giant screen showing pale lavender with text and logos on it. As he speaks he occasionally makes emphatic gestures with his hands. As he finishes talking, he throws back his head and makes a gesture of dismissal or “I don’t know.” Transcript below of his speech.]
Bo Burnham: These content creators are wrestling with these difficult questions of the sort of weird, meta… like, hellscape that it is to be online. It’s weird. It’s weird and it’s complicated. And the kids know it and they sense it.
They’re coming for every second of your life. That’s what these companies are coming to. This company, as well. And it’s not because anyone is bad. It’s not because anyone in this company has evil plans, or is trying to do this. They’re not even doing it consciously. It’s because these companies like Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram and everything they went public and they went to shareholders. So they have to grow. Their entire models are based off of growth. They cannot stay stagnant.
Youtube, Twitter grossed $4-5 billion last year, it is in the red. It is unprofitable. It has to get more of you. No matter how nice it’s trying to be, it is all – They’re trying to get more engagement from you. We -- we used to colonize land. That was the thing you could expand into. And that’s where money was to be made. We colonized the entire earth. There was no other place for the businesses and capitalism to expand into.
And then they realized, human attention. That we can now – they are now trying to colonize every minute of your life. That is what these people are trying to do. Every single free moment you have is a moment you could be looking at your phone, and they could be gathering information to target ads at you. That that’s what’s happening.
So like, as much as we can, you know, have really good conversations the, like, mechanism of the business is rolling towards that just because of the market. So, like. It’s coming. It’s coming for every free second you have. And that’s dark. That’s really, really dark and scary.
And for someone like me, I grew up a little on the internet, and I felt the repercussions of it, I suffer from anxiety. So, I know where it leads. And I’m saying like, you don’t want this. Trust me, like, you’re not going to feel good about yourself.
And you know it. The kids know it.
Like, the whole joke on the internet is everyone’s like, “This place sucks right?” I mean like, that’s like… kind of the thing. That’s why their memes are all ironic and detached, and self-referential and 12-layers deep.
‘Cause truth is completely dead to them and they know it. They look at the president, they look at the culture, they go, “What the hell is this?” They look at like, Coca-Cola commercials that are winking at them and smiling. And they go like, “Forget it.”
So like, ugh, I have no idea [audio cuts out, captions remain that show the end of the sentence] what’s going to happen.
